


Missing Stars

by venndaai



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, Character Study, F/F, Pining, Space Stations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21789460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: The Behemoth becomes Medina Station. Drummer changes too.
Relationships: Camina Drummer & Fred Johnson, Camina Drummer/Naomi Nagata, Camina Drummer/Samantha Rosenberg, Klaes Ashford & Camina Drummer
Comments: 13
Kudos: 56
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Missing Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neros_violin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neros_violin/gifts).



> This story is informed by season four but does not spoil anything past the first few minutes of it.

When Camina Drummer was eighteen and living on Pallas, corporate security caught her breaking into a private dock. They beat her and threw her in a holding cell the size of an air filtration unit, promising that within the week she’d be on a prison barge headed for Earth, where she’d live out the rest of her short life in a filthy prison as the gravity crushed her shitty Belter body. Nobody would save her. Nobody cared about her. She had nothing, and all she was was a meaningless ID number.

Five hours later, she was free, or thought she was. The OPA had arranged it, she was told. The OPA looked after its own, because no one else was going to.

Another eighteen years later, and Fred Johnson was saying to her, “So the ship is a station now. You’re still the captain. I expect you to do your job.” 

“Captain of what?” Drummer said. “You know what all those doors in the universe mean? You know the rush that’s going to happen, to gobble those new planets up? The Inners know, and they’re still sitting here watching us. You said we are a nation, now. The Belt. This not the Belt, out here. This politics, and it need a politician.”

She waited. Communications with Tycho were much better now than they had been a week ago, now that the communication relays were properly set up and the thing everyone was now calling the Sol Gate was permanently open, but there was still a lag time of four minutes that no one could do anything about, short of changing the laws of physics. Which might as well be the next thing to happen, Drummer thought. 

And the lag would only increase, as Tycho’s orbit swung it away from the gate. She hated that thought, so she couldn’t stop picturing it, like poking at a rotted tooth. 

She stared at Fred’s face. He was looking down at something on his tablet, some other crisis he was dealing with while he waited for her message. She saw when her words arrived, watched him swing his eyes up politely to look at her while he listened. 

“You’ll do fine,” said the four-minutes-in-the-past image of Fred. “I can’t come out there right now. There are things that need doing here. But I’ll see you next year. Keep me updated. Try not to kill Klaes. I don’t need Dawes any more angry at me.” 

And the screen flickered back to the blue background. He’d hung up on her. He’d hung up on her four minutes ago. 

She leaned back in her chair, feeling a grin of fury on her face. 

So the girl who’d been worth nothing was now sitting in the position of greatest power any human had ever held, guarding the gateway to the universe. 

It was just like Fred to signal absolute, stupid trust in her, and to do it in such a deeply irritating way. 

The Rocinante was comparatively closer than Tycho, at least for now. At least when looked at from a certain perspective. From one angle, both Fred and Naomi were some unknown but almost certainly unimaginably vast distance from her. Unimaginably vast even by the standards of space, which were already too much for an imagination designed to calculate distances between trees in some ancient Terran jungle. The Behemoth floated in a blackness broken not by stars but by those strange, jarringly regular blue circles that were the gates. From one perspective, the six hundred humans on board it might as well be living in a different universe from the rest of their species.

From another perspective, the lag to the Rocinante was, for the moment, about ten seconds. Increasing every moment as the ship shot past the orbit of Uranus, accelerating sunwards towards Tycho, where the passengers on board would find passage back to the inner planets, and the crew…

The crew would go where they wanted, Drummer supposed. 

They had all chosen freedom over duty. She wished them joy of it.

And she waited for Naomi to call. Told herself she had no expectations. Knew that for a lie when the incoming message popped up on her terminal in the middle of a meeting and her throat closed up, forcing her to take several deep breaths before pissing off ten ships’ captains by postponing their negotiations on docking fees. Shoved herself down a tube corridor and into an empty alcove, thanking the universe that she’d been having the meeting near the zero-g docks and not in the spinning Drum. The indicator was still up thirty seconds later when she accepted the message. 

“Hi,” Naomi said, and she sounded nervous. Drummer heard that in the audio before her brain managed to process the image. 

Naomi had cut her hair. Fifteen days out of the OPA- fifteen days out of Drummer’s life- and she’d already removed the visual markers of their time together. It looked good. The Rocinante jumpsuit looked more natural on her than the new Medina Station Administration uniform looked on Drummer. 

“Hi,” Drummer said, and counted down from ten in her head, so she’d know exactly when Naomi heard her voice. 

When she got to eleven, Naomi’s eyes softened, and Drummer felt herself exhale in relief. 

Still friends. 

One thing Drummer had learned from ten years of being thrown into positions of authority in times of great upheaval: to stay sane and focused, you had to categorize outcomes under levels of acceptability. That was the mode she’d been operating under, since they’d passed through the Ring, since things between her and Naomi had broken. Naomi being dead was an unacceptable state of reality. Naomi being alive but completely excised from Drummer’s universe, nothing more than a memory and the Rocinante’s drive signature, was acceptable but would have required drastic measures to patch the holes that would have left in Drummer’s soul. A Naomi who was still her friend was, well, it hurt like hell but with a few extra drinks each off shift she’d be able to handle it. 

“How are you?” Naomi asked. 

“I’m fine,” Drummer said. “Busy. News gets around fast. We already have rockhoppers from the Uranus system with Epsteins glued on, jumping through the Ring and coming here looking for a piece of whatever this pie is. Already got the factions breathing down my neck, too. And the _Inyalowda_ telling everyone go home.”

Ten more seconds. Drummer found she didn’t mind the delay. It gave her time to just look at Naomi’s eyes, imagine how they’d look without the distortions of the tiny screen. 

Naomi smiled. “I know you can handle them.”

“Pashang ya,” Drummer said. “How are you?”

“Adjusting. It’s odd, being back on a ship this small, with only five other people. Lot quieter. Less work for me to do, too.” 

“Regret it yet?” Drummer said, and immediately clamped her jaw shut, felt her fist clench on its handhold. _Sabaka_. She looked away, but managed to make herself look back in time to see Naomi’s face change, go sad. 

Drummer had been born on a rockhopper. She’d often thought that while Belters were forcibly united by the universal physical facts of life in space, they had their own cultural divisions almost as strong as those between Earth and Mars, dome and sky. In the Belt the division was time. As a child, on a ship with no Epstein drive, designed to ‘hop’ from one asteroid to another, Drummer’s life had been divided into intervals of half-weeks; a day out to a potential mining location, two days rock-busting, a day back to the nearest port, a day there to hopefully offload before heading out again. But then there were Belters who worked on the ice haulers or the outer planets supply run, and their lives were weeks, months of solitude on their tiny cramped ships, interspersed by a few days here and there on stations, pockets of human society in the vast and empty black. And then there were the third group, the stationers, who could live their whole lives on one single rock with a population in the hundreds, and only be aware of the rest of humanity in the abstract. Drummer had been born a rockhopper, spent a few years on an OPA pirate ship doing things she didn’t like to remember, and for the last ten years had been adjusting to station life, to time broken up by a five hour day as Tycho spun, to a year four times as long as the one marked by Terran calendars. Then Fred had made her captain of the Behemoth, and she’d shifted categories again; and then the Behemoth had become _seteshang Medina._

There’d be a fourth category of Belters now, Drummer thought, if the species didn’t wipe itself out in the next few years, if a new generation grew up on the structure that had once been a ship and was now a station. A generation growing up without sun or stars, without rotation periods or flight paths or the plane of the ecliptic. Those kids would see every tide of humanity pass through on their way to a thousand different worlds. And most of them would never see any of those worlds themselves. 

Drummer certainly wouldn’t. Her spine screamed in pain under even the .3G of Medina Station’s Drum. She made circuits of the outer sections, the ones on the float, and was fine, but each shift she returned to the office the Mormons had built for the captain they had imagined, one who would like heavy gravity, and light that mimicked a day outside on Earth, and pictures of the lies they told about their past. 

She laughed at the pictures, pulled a few muscles doing too many exercises, and silently fumed. 

Her crew worked, and their new home transformed. The alien station stayed quiet. And new ships gathered around the Sol Gate. Belters, desperate most of them. Intent on heading out into the unknown. Drummer advised them to go home over vidcalls, but she knew it would do no good. Most of them had no home to go to. She sent shuttles through the Gate, loaded with all the fuel and supplies and tech support Medina could spare, because that was what it was to be a Belter.

“I have room on the station,” she said over vidcall with the Inners in charge of the informal blockade. “Let me offer them a place here.”

They’d denied her completely until she’d threatened to go to the news, and then they’d said she could bring people through the Ring in shuttles, but anything with a drive was staying out. She smiled and thanked them through what felt like a mouth full of glass. 

Most of the would-be colonists didn’t accept her offer, which was good, because Medina couldn’t have accommodated them all anyway. But some did. Her station was becoming a city.

Three months after the departure of the Rocinante, a ship arrived from Tycho, and was let through the Ring after six hours of debate. It arrived at Medina with fifty of the Belt’s best aboard. Skilled specialists Fred had deigned to send her way, in between whatever mysterious work he wasn’t telling her about. One of them was Samara Rosenberg. 

“You need a new Chief Engineer,” said the text message from Fred that arrived with her. Fucker hadn’t actually called in weeks. “She’s the best I’ve got.”

It was true, of course. It was entirely unreasonable to feel resentful. 

Drummer vaguely remembered the woman, from Tycho. She was good. Maybe even better than her predecessor, if Drummer was being scrupulously honest, at least when it came to the day-to-day running of large scale systems. Drummer doubted she could kill someone in thirty seconds by dropping an elevator on them, but then, very few could. It was unreasonable to resent getting only the second biggest genius in the universe to keep her station alive. 

What she didn’t remember was that Rosenberg was perky. When Drummer met her at the docks, the woman was obviously somewhat nervy, but she got comfortable fast, and as she chattered about environmental stressors and data allocations she also made sure to give her new captain a couple of very direct glances. 

Drummer looked back. Well. Where was the harm? Rosenberg was certainly attractive, and it had been three and a half months. 

Which was the problem, of course. 

She responded to Rosenberg with sharp smiles that were only slightly more than professional, and had a drink with her in the bar, but only one, and only because she was proud that her new spinal implant allowed her to walk around freely inside the Drum.

“This place,” Rosenberg said, gesturing up at the vastness. “Don’t you find it exciting?”

“Mmm,” Drummer said. “Breaks in plenty of exciting ways every day.”

“I look forward to the challenge,” Rosenberg said. 

Had Drummer ever felt that way about life? She must have, once.

“The blockade will be lifted when we are satisfied that the worlds beyond the Ring are safe for settlers, and not before,” the UN Secretary-General said on Drummer’s screen. She glittered like some decadent tyrant from Earth’s past. Her eyes were cold. “I appreciate the OPA’s assistance during this difficult transitional period, and value our new alliance highly.”

“She’s a snake,” Naomi had told Drummer, once. “Exactly the kind of stereotype Earther the buckers rant about down in the medina. We didn’t get along.” She’d reached over to brush a strand of hair out of Drummer’s eyes. “But let’s not talk about another woman right now, ke?” Her eyes had been crinkled with a smile. 

Drummer paused the replay of the video message, and checked again to see if Fred had answered her requests for communication. He hadn’t. 

The Rocinante was on its way back. Heading for one of the gates to a new solar system. The communication lag shrank every day.

Despite this, Naomi didn’t vidcall. Perhaps that made sense. She must be busy, building up her Belter physique to survive a planet’s gravity well, repairing and preparing the Rocinante’s systems for whatever they might encounter at their destination. It was more convenient for her to send five minute video files, compressed into packets of data sent across the void. Drummer, who was almost certainly more busy, would have happily dedicated an hour for a time-lagged conversation; but that was her own business. Five minutes of video a week was sufficient. The first two minutes of each recording was updates on the status of the ship and the latest communications from Ilus. The last three were the confidences of a friend, and contained Naomi’s rare, perfect smile, and the warmth of her eyes. 

It was sufficient. 

Drummer responded in kind. If sometimes her responses went over the ten minute mark- she simply hoped that didn’t come off as pathetic as it felt. 

Sometimes, Naomi’s messages were recorded in the Rocinante’s exercise room. She’d talk into the camera lens while doing chin-ups, her skin glistening with sweat, her breathing quick and hard as she labored under the gravity of burn acceleration. Every week Drummer watched Naomi’s body change, transforming into something that could survive the conditions it had originally been designed for. 

Drummer was calibrating herself for a different environment. When she wasn’t floating through endless meetings or performing surprise inspections, she was pushing her marksmanship to its limits in the firing range or learning low grav hand to hand from an old Belter woman with tattoos over every inch of her body. Drummer had two scars on her abdomen now, front and back, and each morning when she dressed she pressed her fists against the raised flesh and decided for the hundredth time that she’d never feel helpless again. 

“Might not be my place to say it,” Ashford commented one morning in Operations, sipping his disgusting black Vestan coffee from a bulb as he floated in front of the main viewscreen, “but your schedule’s been a might crowded lately.” 

Drummer glared at him. It never worked, but not doing it would have been giving ground. “You tracking me, dzhemang?”

“Someone’s got to,” Ashford said, grinning. 

“You’re right,” she said, and paused before continuing. “It’s not your place.”

Fred had asked her, months ago, what she wanted to do with Ashford. The traditional Belter punishment for mutiny was spacing, of course, but that was never on the table, not with most of Ashford’s crew of pirate bastards still mixed in with Fred’s, all loyal to Dawes, and Dawes ready to turn the factions against Medina if he wanted to. She could have sent them all home, but that would have been stupid. If Medina Station was going to belong to the Belt, then it had to belong to the Belt. Not to one faction, not to one group. 

Besides, she liked the fucker. 

“I pass out on duty,” she said, “then it’s your place. Otherwise keep your nose out of my business.”

He gave her a Belter salute. 

“The ship from Tycho,” Drummer said. “The Connaught. Start crewing her up. I’ll feel better once we have a warship of our own this side of the Gate.”

He raised his eyebrows at her, but didn’t state the obvious- that there was nothing one Belter ship could do against the fleet that made up the blockade. Instead he raised his fist at her in a nod. “Ya.”

  
  


“You asked how I was,” Drummer said, staring at the blinking red light of her tablet. “I’m tired. I’m tired and I’m sorry. I couldn’t understand why you na want to be here, be part of this. Starting to get it now. If Fred calls Holden tell him fuck you for me.”

She stared a little longer, then laughed.

“Don’t feel sorry for me, Nagata. Not like I’d rather be heading to your death planet. Supposed to be here right now. Maybe later, somewhere else. Maybe see you around somewhere. All good.” She was surprised to find herself smiling. 

“Talk to you later,” she said, and sent the message. 

Then she sent a simple text message to Engineer Rosenberg. _Drinks 15:00, on me?_

She put the tablet in her pocket. Turned back to the railing and looked out. She liked this spot, overlooking the machine shop where she’d nearly died, overlooking the curve of the Drum, the mile of open air the closest she’d ever get to imagining what it would be like to stand on a planet. Better than her office and its white Mormon walls. 

She laughed again, and turned to go.


End file.
